Hello! Hardware transcoding works great for me at 720p or higher resolutions and saves my Intel NUC server a lot of CPU power when enabled. However my 480p or lower transcode remote users complain the quality is unwatchable. Please add a setting to only use hardware transcoding at select resolutio…

I am far from a plex guru but have used plex for 3-4 years on Pc’s (and NUCS) Several Shields, and several Synology and qnap NAS. I think u have your thinking wrong. Firstly you don’t want transcoding unless u must. So if everything is transcoding there lies the problem. I convert/remux everythin…

I appreciate the response but it’s off base. I have no control over what clients my users are using, in this case a friend is watching a very old TV show which is encoded in AVI 480p. The user has a PlayStation 4 and their plex client transcodes the show when they watch it on the PS4. So if hardware…

I get what you are asking and whether that can be done or not I have no idea. But really if your “friends” want to use your free service it is up to them to get a box that works.:stuck_out_tongue:

I completely agree with this request, i want the exact same feature. we should be able to say use hardware transcoding but only for videos that are higher than a given resolution. I have the same problem that some stuff looks like absolute garbage when HW transcoding is enabled. I got a quadro m2000…

I also want this feature, selective transcoding method based upon libraries, collections, bitrates will be very useful. Thinking about it, there is a workaround but it involves duplicating PMS which is not ideal if you have a huge library. This would work on Windows on older PLEX versions I think: …

This shouldn’t be selectable by just resolution, but also by bitrate. The lower the bitrate, the more desirable it is to use CPU over GPU – especially very low bitrates. In addition, GPU should still be used for decoding and scaling.

Thanks for posting this. I’m not enjoying the current toggle that not only enables hardware transcoding, but forces it to do every job. It’s resulting in bloated, bandwidth-wasting high bitrates.

Selective Hardware Transcoding by resolution

Feature Suggestions

lawbabie February 11, 2025, 5:40pm 8

Agreed - my low-quality streaming files looked tiled/blurry with HW transcoding. If I can tell Plex to only use HW transcoding if CPU is running hot, or if I have more than two movies streaming all subsequent streams use HW transcoding, or to not transcode anything below 720, or a combination of the three. I’m not a fan of ‘only use HW transcoding for movies in this particular library’ approach. I posted a question to this very issue without seeing a feature request which matches my issue.

Topic		Replies	Views
CPU encode option for lower bit rates/resolutions Feature Suggestions	1	83	June 2, 2022
Better Bitrate / Transcode Options for Servers Feature Suggestions	3	350	March 6, 2025
Hardware recommendation for GPU transcoding (Please)... General Discussions	11	4057	April 27, 2018
Transcoding: Better to have powerful CPU only or decent CPU with GPU transcoding? General Discussions	43	2578	November 3, 2017
Hardware Transcoding fine tuning Plex Media Server server-unraid	3	156	February 13, 2025

Selective Hardware Transcoding by resolution

Related topics